spontaneous human combustion

That someone could burn to death and be reduced to ashes without being in
a fire sounds incredible. Yet the bizarre phenomenon of "spontaneous human
combustion" has been well documented by police investigators and forensic
pathologists around the world. The evidence suggests that it is
real. But how it possibly happen?

One of the earliest descriptions of it comes from Howe's Chronicles
of 1613:

Hitchell, a carpenter, had been at the house of John Dean,
of Parley Court, and returning home on Saturday eve, went to bed with
his wife and young child. At midnight there happened a great and sodaine
lighting. Hitchell's wife was upon a sodaine very grievously burned all
the one side of her, and her husband and child lay dead close by her,
but perceiving that her husband still burned inwardly, she drew him to
the open street, where through the vehemency of the fire she was constrained
to forsake hime and he lay burning upon the earth for ye space of almost
three days. There was no outward appearance of fire, but only a kind of
smoke and glowing heat ascending from his body, until it was quite consumed
to ashes, except only some small pieces of his bones which some of the
sad beholders cast into a pit made neere the place.

When a person dies in a normal fire, the extremities may burn away
but the torso, although possibly badly charred, remains intact. Most cases
of spontaneous human combustion, by contrast, are marked by the almost complete
destruction of the torso. A modern gas-fired crematorium achieves the same
effect by burning up to 1,000 cubic feet of gas with 20,000 cubic feet of
air at 900°C. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be impossible to
reduce an entire body to ashes without temperatures of over 1,600°C
for several hours. Yet, astonishingly, in every well-documented account
of spontaneous human combustion, the fire damage to the surroundings of
the victim was minimal.

John Heymer, a scene-of-crime officer with the Gwent Police in Wales, recalled
the extraordinary aftermath of such an incident on January 6, 1980:

The house was located on top of a hill and the
weather was bitterly cold. On entering the house I was struck by the pleasant
warmth. There was no sign of central heating or any other form of heating.
The uniformed officers who had requested my presence told me that the
fire had occurred in the living room.

I opened the door and stepped into a cooling oven. There was a steamy
sauna-like heat and the room was bathed in a garish orange radiance. The
orange light emanated from a bare light bulb which was coated with a sticky
orange substance as was the window. The temperature of the room had recently
been extremely high. The walls were radiating heat. Condensation
was running down the window. Heat had cracked one of the window panes.

The light bulb was bare because the plastic lamp shade had melted, oozed
down the bulb and fallen to the floor. The walls, ceiling, and all surfaces
were coated with a greasy black soot.

On one wall was an open grate which contained the dead ashes of a coal
fire. The hearth was tidy. There were no signs of any coals having fallen
on the floor.

On the floor, about a meter from the hearth, was a pile of ashes. On the
perimeter of the ashes, further from the hearth, was a partially burned
armchair. Emerging from the ashes were a pair of human feet clothed in
socks. The feet were attached to short lengths of lower leg encased in
trouser bottoms. Protruding from what was left of the trousers were calcined
leg bones which merged into the ashes. The ashes were the incinerated
remains of a man.

Of the torso and arms, nothing remained but ash. Opposite the feet was
a blackened skull. Though the rug and carpet beneath the ashes were charred
the damage did not extend more than a few centimeters beyond the perimeter
of the ashes. Less than a meter away a settee fitted with loose covers
was not even scorched. Plastic tiles which covered the floor beneath the
carpet were undamaged.

Although extremely high temperatures had developed in the room, nothing
had burnt that had not been in contact with the body while it was being
consumed. Reason told me that the scene I was viewing was impossible.
Everyone at the scene experienced the same sensation of incredulity, a
strong urge to deny the evidence of their senses.

Heymer learned of a similar incident in the same part of Wales a month later,
involving a woman. Some extraordinary parallels emerged between the two
cases. Both victims, being elderly, had taken great care to draught-proof
the rooms in which they died, blocking out every possible gap around doors
and windows.This prevented oxygen entering from outside and was presumably
the reason that the contents of the room hadn't caught fire. The torsos
of both people were completely destroyed. Not a single organ survived, except
a leather-like shrunken left lung in the case of the woman. All the bones
were reduced to ash from the neck to the mid-thigh, while the blackened
skulls and untouched lower portions of legs remained. Forensic tests revealed
that both the man and the woman had almost certainly been alive at the start
of the incineration.

These facts present science with what seems like a formidable challenge.
One response has been the so-called "candle theory," according to which
a human body – especially an obese one – has the potential to
burn like a candle. Subcutaneous fat would supply a wax-like
fuel while clothes substituted for a wick. Many cases of the phenomenon,
as it happens, have involved overweight people.

Yet there are many questions that this theory doesn't seem properly to address.
How does the body catch alight in the first place? And, if the person were
alive at the start, why wouldn't they make some concerted effort to extinguish
themselves? In the cases just described, if a lack of oxygen prevented furniture
and other objects in the room from burning, how was it that the bodies themselves
were so thoroughly consumed? If spontaneous human combustion is real then
it seems that strongly exothermic chemical reactions can occasionally take
place in our bodies of which, at present, we have a very poor understanding.
Although, having said that, at least new interesting line of speculation
has recently opened up.

For centuries, people have spoken of seeing fleeting ghosts in water-logged
graveyards and will-'-the wisps flitting across marshy ground. It's long
been suspected that the pale light observed in such cases is caused by the
ignition of marsh gas, or methane –
a chemical produced in large amounts by the kind of anerobic microorganisms
that thrive in boggy places. But the stumbling block to this idea lay in
explaining how the methane could be ignited. Then, in 1993, two German researchers,
Dieter Glindemann and the satisfyingly named Gunter Gassmann, of the Helgoland
Biological Institute in Hamburg, furnished what could be a vital clue.

Following earlier reports that phosphine had been detected in sewage sludge
and marine sediments, Glindemann and Gassmann posited that this flammable
gas might be produced in the same strongly reducing conditions in which
methane is made. Sure enough, their investigations confirmed this suspicion.
There seems every likelihood, therefore, that the wispy, glimmering lights
sometimes seen over marshy ground are caused by methane that has been ignited
by phosphine.

One further fascinating conjecture by the two German researchers stemmed
from their observations that phosphine, along with large amounts of methane,
is produced in the guts of cattle. Glindemann and Gassmann reasoned that
the process of digestion in humans should
generate even greater concentration of phosphine since our diet is richer
than that of herbivores in sources of phosphate, including processed meats,
cheese, and cola drinks. A build-up of phosphine and methane in the body
could be the recipe for disaster – the ignition of a chemical cocktail
that might just be the crucial process underlying spontaneous human combustion.
For the moment, it remains merely a conjecture. But if confirmed it could
lead in future to coal cans carrying some very unusual warnings from the
Surgeon General.